Luckily, there were paper towels and a cloth in here. They cleaned up, Vargr even kneeling to wipe between her legs… and bite her thighs until she tried to drag his mouth to her.
“No.” He stood and helped pull up her underwear and leggings then kissed her once, slowly, passionately. “Let’s go.”
She gave an exasperated sigh then followed, hand in his hand, feeling like a naughty pupil returning to the classroom.
49
The whiras the drone was launched out the window was almost soothing, though the room itself resembled the trenches of a war zone. The drone operator was to the front—he had to be to be sure the radio waves communicated with the drone as it ascended. The concrete in the scraper would likely block it otherwise—or so Vargr had told her. She recalled little about drones.
This was a large one, apparently. Almost a yard across. Not armed. Few were back before the invasion. All this Vargr had said and she assumed he would know. The military had only just begun arming them. A pity as they might have worked well… assuming the operators weren’t susceptible to the Lure.
Cyn frowned. Okay, they had all been susceptible back then, unless a beaster.
She was dithering about in her head, thinking, since nothing much of significance had happened.
The forward-facing explosives sat just behind the operator steering the drone. He was to retreat if anything appeared. If it lost the signal, the drone would, hopefully, land on the ground in the gap between the quarters.
Little Mo remained with Willow behind that line of explosives. Willow had designated him their forward detector of stinkers. Around them was her first line of five, in total, foot and wing-soldiers. Behind those and closer to Cyn were three more, and then Vargr and her. It would be difficult to shoot over their heads, but she would if she must.
She’d jump andnot shoot anyone nice. Vargr had drummed that into her.
Shoot the right people this time.
All of this was just in case something happened that should not.
In case the Ghoul Lords had somehow detected them. Despite her previous nervous anticipation, she doubted that would happen. She’d been inside the mind of one for a few milliseconds and they actually seemed—she’d decided this after thinking about it for a while—quite stupid.
Evil, yes, vicious in their genocidal need to feed on humans, but stupid. They were apex predators that had no need to evolve.
So, maybe they could be defeated if beasters employed their brains?
She smiled, watching the elegant Willow conduct this operation. There weren’t a lot of muscles on her, though she was fit. She was all fine bones and fancy thinking, with a strategy for everything in advance.
Cyn knew herself—she was the one with the craving to kill, to bathe in the act of violence when she was called. Her nanites might have created this need but who cared? It thrilled her.
Willow had a need to thoroughly and with no compunction whatsoever for their status as a living thing, out-think the Ghoul Lords and wipe them out.Back at you, genocidal aliens. Take that up the butt.
In desperate times, leaders arise.
“What’s that?” Vargr’s words came even as she saw it. A figure, no three, dropping before the windows on ropes of some sort, then they burst through, sending glass flying.
The drone operator was fleeing, the console he’d held, dropping, but the Lure exploded along with the spinning glass pieces.
Shiny.
She felt her eyes widening, her thoughts blowing out beyond the back of her skull, and caught herself.
Just.
In time.
The Lure.
And Cyn began to wrestle, doing what she’d practiced, rising from her seat as if that could help. It couldn’t. The pink tendrils snaked everywhere, thrown out by these three who, she suddenly saw, were patchwork humans.
Fucking Ghoul Lords.
Stinkers climbed and jumped in through the windows and the gaping holes in the glass, following after the skinsuits like deadly sharp toys. Their triangular legs thunked into the floor, chewing out chunks. The drone operator was the first to fall, mowed down by a stinker using his back for a target. The sharp legs burst out through his front as he toppled onto his face.
